Every Rose Has A Thorn
by H. S. Hines
Summary: Downward spiral for B'Elanna and Seven.rnIf you want a feelgood story, save this one for when you don't! !WARNING! This story deals with the possibility of love between two women B'Elanna Torres and Seven of Nine but IS NOT A ROMANCE.


_Disclaimer: Paramount owns all the characters and vessels in this story. I take full responsibility for the story itself. No money is being made, nor any copyright infringement intended. !WARNING! This story deals with the possibility of love between two women (B'Elanna Torres and Seven of Nine) but IS NOT A ROMANCE._

Code: T/7.  
Genre: Angst (yes, I've written fluff, no you may not see it)  
Rating: R  
Feedback: Always welcome and appreciated, as long as it's not a flame. Flames are for candles, not fanfiction.

**Every Rose Has A Thorn**

B'Elanna threw up. It wasn't a pleasant sensation, nor one she had felt many times in the past, as her Klingon physiology usually protected her from such unpleasantness, but there was nothing being Klingon could do for her today.

Still born.

She had been still born.

B'Elanna stood and ran from the lavatory into the living quarters she had been hiding in. First Tom had left her, saying that he didn't want anything to do with a woman that would try to alter the physiology of an unborn baby. That hadn't been so bad. She accepted it, because she was in love with someone else.

That someone couldn't feel love.

She couldn't care about B'Elanna, even if she wanted to. Because she was...

Borg.

B'Elanna picked up the couch and threw it, feeling something rip in her shoulder. Not the pain of it, she was past feeling pain, but the sensation of bone separating from cartilage. She looked at it hanging limply at her side and screamed in rage before falling down, sick again.

Emotional inhibitor. '_Damn, couldn't I use one of those,_' B'Elanna thought bitterly. Somehow she managed to sit up and began rocking back and forth. Still born emotions, dead emotions, dead baby. Her mind cruelly played the words over in her mind, in a macabre lullaby.

"I could undergo a series of surgeries, that would leave me with emotions, but there is no guarantee that I will either survive the procedure or regain what was stolen from me if I did." _'Stolen from me..._' B'Elanna had heard those words from Seven's own lips, but that phrase stuck with her, describing how she felt about the blonde drone.

Drone.

'_No, she's not a drone. That word can't begin to describe her_,' B'Elanna thought. She stood up and began prodding her dislocated shoulder, trying to put it back in place. But she couldn't. She couldn't do anything right. Not maintain a marriage, have a baby... hell, she couldn't even fall in love correctly.

She sat on the floor and howled in heartbroken rage.

"I regret that I cannot return your feelings. I will not engage in a relationship that cannot be fulfilling. It would only be detrimental to you."

"I don't care, Seven! I love you, damn it!"

"I am sorry."

"I won't give up." Give up. B'Elanna hadn't given up. She had fought and she had lost. Seven wasn't even willing to try. Not with her. Not with her. "Not with me," B'Elanna said aloud. "Chakotay. That bastard." B'Elanna's own feelings for the dark man were long dead, buried under friendship and duty and decorum.

Seven had begun dating Chakotay. She had started undergoing the surgeries. For him. Not her. Never her. Who was she? '_Nothing. I'm nothing, nobody._' B'Elanna cried, her heart pouring out her eyes onto her cheeks to be wasted on the floor.

'_No one knows I'm here. No one cares,_' B'Elanna thought. She looked around what had once been the Torres-Paris quarters and cried even harder. The little crib was just visible in the bedroom, with the tiny mobile shining happily, awaiting a baby that would never come.

B'Elanna looked down at her stomach. She hadn't yet shrunk down yet, there was still a bulge, to remind her of what was now gone.

Everything was gone. And it was all her fault.

-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;

Seven looked at Chakotay, sleeping beside her. She felt a wave of nausea and dizziness, but it passed. As it always did. The surgeries took a lot out of her. Her relationship took out even more. The real Chakotay was little like his holographic counterpart and they had little in common. She knew that the relationship was doomed, but she was frightened of ending it.

Not of her own emotions, which did not surface when she was with him, as they did on the holodeck. She was frightened of his. From the moment they had come together, it was obvious that he was possessive, passionate and a little controlling. At first, she had enjoyed these attributes. Now they worried her.

She didn't know how to terminate a relationship that she had no control of. He never hit her, he didn't threaten her, but there was something about him that warned her not to push him away. That he wouldn't take 'no' for an answer.

To err is human.

She was human. The Borg could not take her mistakes from her. Raped of everything else, they had left only the worst parts of humanity within her. Now that she was trying to claim those parts that they had stolen, she found she was still not out of their reach. They still controlled her.

She wished she knew how to control herself.

-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;

B'Elanna walked to the holodeck, her arm limp at her side and aching slightly, beyond her perception. She saw everything in a focus so sharp that it hurt. She felt light and strong. But cold burned through her like a winter. She was winter, barren and lifeless.

She looked at the program she had run. It was the Cliffs of Bole, a program that Tom had taken her to, to picnic and gaze at the beautiful site. It was all grey to B'Elanna. She walked to the edge of the precipice and felt words pouring out of her mouth:

"I'm so depressed, I cannot cry  
"Burn these regrets, I hold inside  
"And for this pain there's no release  
"In the cold rain I try to cease  
"What is this strangest apathy?  
"Who is this stranger inside me?  
"Don't wanna live, don't wanna die  
"But life I give a kiss good-bye  
"'Cause I don't care that deep I hurt  
"It's broken there that's why the dirt  
"Now my soul stains and leaves it bare  
"With tired pain that cannot care  
"Let me release this heavy heart  
"Let out my beast and let us part  
"So I am free from this cold cage  
"And empty me of all my rage..."

She looked down at the rocky crags beneath, wondering if she could really shatter her body against them. She opened her moth again, intent on finding out.

"Computer." She listened for the sound that told her the computer was working, then continued. "Disengage safety protocols."

_"Warning: Disengaging safety protocols presents extreme risk of injury." _The computer told her, reciting words that she had thrived on for a while, earlier in her life.

"Override."

"Unable to comply. Lieutenant B'Elanna Torres is not authorized to release safety protocols on any holodeck simulation by order of Captain Kathryn Janeway."

B'Elanna closed her eyes and jumped anyway. She felt herself falling, watched the sharp rocks rushing towards her and felt nothing. Not frightened, not exhilarated… nothing. The computer slowed her decent and set her gently at the bottom of the cliff.

"End simulation," she ordered and the scenery vanished, leaving the dark holodeck with its metal grids. She walked back to her quarters, wondering if anyone had found the doctor's program yet, if anyone knew that she wasn't still in sickbay with her twisted commbadge.

Wondered if anyone cared.

-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;

Seven cared. She found the commbadge, twisted and broken, still functioning enough to inform her of whose it was. Within minutes, she discovered that the doctor's program was buried, suppressing the only witness to what had happened. A tiny, bloodstained sheet covered the neonatal biobed and she glanced beneath it to confirm that it was indeed, the Torres baby.

Seven fainted.

Chakotay woke up alone and searched his quarters for Seven. Worry began in his mind that she was with someone else, planning to leave him or worse: that something had happened to her. He asked the computer for her location and upon hearing the answer, went flying down the corridors to the nearest turbolift.

He danced around the lift nervously, flying out into the corridor as soon as it opened. Within seconds, he was in Sickbay, lifting Seven from the floor. He set her on a biobed and called for the EMH. When nothing happened, he looked around the room he was in.

He saw the commbadge on the floor next to where Seven had lain.

"Computer, identify the inhabitants of this room."

"Commander Chakotay, Seven of Nine, Lieutenant B'Elanna Torres," the computer replied. Chakotay called the bridge.

B'Elanna looked at the blood she had managed to draw: little lines over her veins, trickling blood like the tears she couldn't call up anymore. She tried to press harder, but something kept stopping her, just before the vein was sliced open wide.

She watched the blood in fascination, wondering how much it actually hurt. The adrenaline in her body kept feeding her rapidly beating hearts, making her feel heady and weightless. Everything around her was surreal. She picked up the sonic cutter that she had taken from engineering, discarding the heavy bat'leth she had previously used.

The new instrument didn't require any strength; it just sliced her flesh open, releasing the blood beneath. Finally, the tears returned as she stumbled to the bed, curling into a ball. A thought occurred to her. Suddenly, she stood and ran, trying to outrace the pumping of her hearts, her hand covering the bleeding vein to keep her alive just a few minutes longer.

"Deck four!" She yelled at the slow-moving lift, trying to get to Seven's home: Cargo Bay Two, before she died. She wanted Seven to stop her, to make her live. Or to let her die, she didn't care which, so long as the pain eased a little.

"What happened?" Janeway asked as she ran into Sickbay, Tuvok at her heels. Chakotay explained that B'Elanna had trashed her commbadge and hidden the doctor's program, and then guessed at the rest, based on the evidence he had discovered.

"Seven found the commbadge and fainted. As far as I can tell, it's that damn emotional inhibitor in her cortical node. I can't get her to regain consciousness, but her nanoprobes are going insane. They're attacking the inhibitor, like the doctor planned, but it's too early and they're also attacking the rest of her cortical array."

Everyone in the room looked at Seven, whose optical implant was almost glowing with the electricity and nanoprobes shooting across it.

"We have to get the doctor back online!" Janeway ordered, calling to Engineering for a team to get to Sickbay. Suddenly, Seven sat up and began looking around blindly.

"B'Elanna? B'Elanna, are you here? Please answer me, I am sorry. Please!" Seven was frantic and Janeway rushed to grab her searching hand. Chakotay stood, his mouth slightly open, wondering why Seven was calling for B'Elanna. Then he remembered the twisted commbadge.

"Captain, B'Elanna's the only person who would be able to get the doctor up in time," Chakotay said as he read the readings that the computer was providing him on the cortical monitor he had managed to hook up.

"Computer," Janeway barked. "Put me on a shipwide comm channel."

-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;

B'Elanna burst into the Cargo Bay and looked at Seven's alcove. It was 01:23; there was no reason that she shouldn't be regenerating. B'Elanna screamed in frustration as she realized that she had run out of time. She lay down in Seven's alcove as she began to lose consciousness. She was gone before the shipwide announcement pleaded for her return to sickbay, telling her that Seven was calling for her, dying. She never heard any of it. But the last word she said was Seven's name.

-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;

"Please, B'Elanna, I love you! I'm sorry, I couldn't tell you," Seven was babbling, and Janeway closed the link, to save Seven's dignity. Seven begged for B'Elanna to forgive her, to love her and Janeway lost the control she barely held on her emotions, Tears ran down her face as she listened to the monitors screaming their warnings, telling the nonexistent doctors to help the person in the bed.

Telling everyone that Seven was dying.

Janeway tried to tell Seven that B'Elanna was on her way, but Seven wasn't really hearing anything. Her mind was almost gone and her life was slipping away. She listened only for B'Elanna's voice; felt for her hand.

"Help me, B'Elanna. Please, help me. I need you, I can't live... without... you," Seven's pleas died down and she slowly wound down as her life faded. Janeway couldn't stand for Seven to die like this, so she lied.

"Seven, B'Elanna's here." Seven looked around, her eyes glassy and unseeing.

"Where?" She was so far gone that she was willing to believe the lie, desperate to believe that it was true.

"Holding your hand, can't you feel it? She can't speak, because she's..." Kathryn's mind worked as fast as it could, knowing that Seven wasn't gullible, so the lie had to be believable. "Lost her voice from crying. Because she loves you, too. She wants you to know that." Seven smiled, believing.

"I love you, B'Elanna."

"And she loves you, Seven," Kathryn said, not knowing that she wasn't lying. Seven knew, though and she slowly slipped away, thinking that B'Elanna knew that she had been wrong, that she loved her but had been too afraid to tell her. When B'Elanna had told her originally, she wasn't aware that she could love, but slowly, it dawned on her that the reason she didn't feel anything for Chakotay was because she was already in love.

But it had been too late when she realized it and she was afraid to leave Chakotay. So she hid it, but now B'Elanna knew and everything was all right and she could go to sleep.

Kathryn held Seven's hand tightly as she slipped away and when the monitors proclaimed their death scream, she added her own to echo in the minds of everyone who heard it. But never to touch those sleeping their final sleep, longing for the other's arms.

**_The End_**


End file.
